Oscar honors costume designer Piero Tosi

A scene from the 1963 historical drama, "The Leopard," featuring work by costume designer Piero Tosi.

A veteran of luminous films by such directors as Luchino Visconti, Vittorio De Sica and Franco Zeffirelli, Tosi earned five Academy Award nominations during his career for designs that brought elegance, artistry, passion and humor to neo-realist dramas, historical romances and farcical comedies, including "Death in Venice," "The Damned," and "La Cage Aux Folles."

The designer will be honored with a lifetime achievement Oscar from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, at the 5th annual Governors Awards, on Saturday, Nov. 16, 2013.

By CBSNews.com senior producer David Morgan

Credit: 20th Century Fox

Piero Tosi holds a career Golden Globe Award received during a ceremony at Rome's Cinecitta Studios, Saturday, June 24, 2000.

In April 2013 Tosi told Port Magazine that his film career started with a bit of luck, accepting early assignments as an assistant in costume departments working for Luchino Visconti and Franco Zeffirelli. In his early 20s, he was asked to design costumes for Visconti's 1952 film, "Bellissima," starring Anna Magnani. It would be the first of at least 60 motion picture and TV credits.

Credit: AP Photo/Marco Ravagli

Alida Valli and Farley Granger starred in Luchino Visconti's period drama "Senso" (1954), about a married Italian countess' affair with an Austrian army officer.

"Rocco and His Brothers" (1960), by Luchino Visconti, starred Renato Salvatori and Annie Girardot in a neo-realist drama of a family from the south of Italy that emigrates North, to find passion and violence in the city.

Piero Tosi received his first Academy Award nomination for Luchino Visconti's 1963 historical drama, "The Leopard." Based on Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's novel, the film starred Burt Lancaster, Claudia Cardinale and Alain Delon in a story set in the waning days of Italy's aristocracy.

Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale in "The Leopard" (1963). Costumes by Piero Tosi.

Credit: 20th Century Fox

Claudia Cardinale in "The Leopard" (1963). Costume by Piero Tosi.

"You need a special character to do this job," Tosi said in a 2007 Italian documentary, "The Dress and the Face: Portrait of Piero Tosi." "And you need love, a great love of faces … You can read marvelous things into faces. Faces lead me to makes thousands of conjectures."

Credit: 20th Century Fox

A Piero Tosi costume from "The Leopard," at an exhibition of theater and cinema costumes at the Villa Medici in Rome, January 26, 2006.

Credit: ANDREAS SOLARO/AFP/Getty Images

In the 1966 farce "After the Fox," directed by Vittorio De Sica, Peter Sellers played a thief who plots to smuggle two tons of gold into Europe by masquerading as a director shooting a movie about (what else?) a treasure being brought ashore in a small fishing village eager to star in his "film." Costumes by Piero Tosi.

Credit: United Artists

Sophia Loren played three roles (including a black marketeer, a rich businessman's wife, and a prostitute) in Vittorio De Sica's 1963 anthology comedy, "Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow," winner of the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Costumes by Piero Tosi.

Credit: Embassy Pictures

Silvana Mangano wears one of Piero Tosi's creations in a 1967 anthology film about witchcraft and sorcery, "Le streghe (The Witches)." The international cast also included Helmut Berger and Clint Eastwood.

Credit: Lopert Pictures Corporation

Piero Tosi designed costumes for Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1969 film of the Greek tragedy, "Medea."

Credit: New Line Cinema

Luchino Visconti's "The Damned" (1969) dramatized the amorality of Nazism during the Third Reich's rise to power in the 1930s. The story traced the effects of the political upheaval in Germany on a wealthy family entangled with, then targeted by, the Gestapo.

Dirk Bogarde as an ailing composer who becomes fixated upon an adolesent boy, in Luchino Visconti's 1970 adaptation of Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice." Costumes by Piero Tosi, who received his second Academy Award nomination for the film.